Some of your sermons will be very evangelistic, and who knows how God will use those sermons.

Your archives are “space less” meaning no physical cassettes to store, and no CDs to stack and keep from scratching.

With sermon recording now this easy and inexpensive, perhaps it’s time to start getting the Word back out there with some low cost recorders.

Final Disclosure: If you place an order through any of these through my link to amazon, I will receive some compensation from Amazon. It’s my tip jar.

Chris Walker is the principal writer at EvangelismCoach.org. He helps people discover that personal evangelism can be as normal as breathing. Along the way, he helps churches with hospitality ministry and coaches pastors on leading congregational evangelism. He’s currently planting a church in the city in which he lives. Other than that, he’s a sinner who’s life has been redeemed and wants other people to know the grace that has captured him.

Thanks for the presentation. I just participated in a luncheon with Kingdom and have been praying about the CD duplication angle. This seems a lot less expensive, but I see advantages to the Cd format, too (like putting something physical into the hands of congregants and seekers). Being a small church, and having the desire to be good stewards of the resoucres GOd gives us, this is a lot to ponder. Any suggestions?

I don't see a comment on this that got emailed to me, but it's in here.

For a small church, I think that going straight to MP3 creates an easily duplicable file that you can burn to CD for distribution. Some churches do want to still give CDs away.

Here is what I found when we recorded straight to CD.
1. We had to maintain a physical library of masters in protective sleeves. That depended on a physical filing system and storage space. Eventually only one person who knew how to find something becuase they designed the storage system.
2. 70 minute limit — sometimes the preacher would go longer.
3. Keeping the kids out of the stack of blanks.
4. Stack of blanks was a cost.
5. Technicians would forget to label the master and a few weeks later not remember which CD was which.
6. To avoid loss/scratch of a master, we started duplicating the master (two CDs, physical space).
7. If people wanted a recording, the data would be transfered to a computer, and then duplicated 1 at a time. Even with a 52x CD rom, this was still a time consuming process. Often, this wouldn't be ready for at least a week.
8. Never made it to the website: too many steps in the conversion process to mp3, that could only happen when a computer was available.

Here is what we are going to do (our first services are May 9).
1. Record straight to mp3 with this little device.
2. Post it to our website.
3. Email the link to the website to those who want the sermon.
If somebody wants it on a physical CD, we'll offer to email it to them instead.